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Bama Chick
Bama Chick

I know you’re joking about the military and “wokeness” but let me tell y’all a little story. My son has been in the Marines around 18 months. COVID absolutely destroyed his path at Troy - he’s ADHD

The Royal We
The Royal We

1. No one from the Trump campaign ever had any contact with Russia. 2. Well, someone may have had contact with Russia, but the campaign/Trump didn't know about it. 3. Actually, there was con

TexArcher
TexArcher

I'm saying I'd like to get in my car and ram it into Sean Hannity at high speed.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32290

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/13/business/media/fox-dominion-lawsuit-first-amendment.html

 

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In the weeks after President Donald J. Trump lost the 2020 election, the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs claimed to have “tremendous evidence” that voter fraud was to blame. That evidence never emerged but a new culprit in a supposed scheme to rig the election did: Dominion Voting Systems, a maker of election technology whose algorithms, Mr. Dobbs said, “were designed to be inaccurate.”

 

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Maria Bartiromo, another host on the network, falsely stated that “Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company.” Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News personality, speculated that “technical glitches” in Dominion’s software “could have affected thousands of absentee mail-in ballots.”

 

 

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Those unfounded accusations are now among the dozens cited in Dominion’s defamation lawsuit against the Fox Corporation, which alleges that Fox repeatedly aired false, far-fetched and exaggerated allegations about Dominion and its purported role in a plot to steal votes from Mr. Trump.

 

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Those bogus assertions — made day after day, including allegations that Dominion was a front for the communist government in Venezuela and that its voting machines could switch votes from one candidate to another — are at the center of the libel suit, one of the most extraordinary brought against an American media company in more than a generation.

 

Spoiler

First Amendment scholars say the case is a rarity in libel law. Defamation claims typically involve a single disputed statement. But Dominion’s complaint is replete with example after example of false statements, many of them made after the facts were widely known. And such suits are often quickly dismissed, because of the First Amendment’s broad free speech protections and the high-powered lawyers available to a major media company like Fox. If they do go forward, they are usually settled out of court to spare both sides the costly spectacle of a trial.

But Dominion’s $1.6 billion case against Fox has been steadily progressing in Delaware state court this summer, inching ever closer to trial. There have been no moves from either side toward a settlement, according to interviews with several people involved in the case. The two companies are deep into document discovery, combing through years of each other’s emails and text messages, and taking depositions.

These people said they expected Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, who own and control the Fox Corporation, to sit for depositions as soon as this month.

The case threatens a huge financial and reputational blow to Fox, by far the most powerful conservative media company in the country. But legal scholars say it also has the potential to deliver a powerful verdict on the kind of pervasive and pernicious falsehoods — and the people who spread them — that are undermining the country’s faith in democracy. 

“We’re litigating history in a way: What is historical truth?” said Lee Levine, a noted First Amendment lawyer who has argued several major media defamation cases. “Here you’re taking very recent current events and going through a process which, at the end, is potentially going to declare what the correct version of history is.”

The case has caused palpable unease at the Fox News Channel, said several people there, who would speak only anonymously. Anchors and executives have been preparing for depositions and have been forced to hand over months of private emails and text messages to Dominion, which is hoping to prove that network employees knew that wild accusations of ballot rigging in the 2020 election were false. The hosts Steve Doocy, Dana Perino and Shepard Smith are among the current and former Fox personalities who either have been deposed or will be this month.

Dominion is trying to build a case that aims straight at the top of the Fox media empire and the Murdochs. In court filings and depositions, Dominion lawyers have laid out how they plan to show that senior Fox executives hatched a plan after the election to lure back viewers who had switched to rival hard-right networks, which were initially more sympathetic than Fox was to Mr. Trump’s voter-fraud claims.

Libel law doesn’t protect lies. But it does leave room for the media to cover newsworthy figures who tell them. And Fox is arguing, in part, that’s what shields it from liability. Asked about Dominion’s strategy to place the Murdochs front and center in the case, a Fox Corporation spokesman said it would be a “fruitless fishing expedition.” A spokeswoman for Fox News said it was “ridiculous” to claim, as Dominion does in the suit, that the network was chasing viewers from the far-right fringe.

Fox is expected to dispute Dominion’s estimated self-valuation of $1 billion and argue that $1.6 billion is an excessively high amount for damages, as it has in a similar defamation case filed by another voting machine company, Smartmatic.

A spokesman for Dominion declined to comment. In its initial complaint, the company’s lawyers wrote that “The truth matters,” adding, “Lies have consequences.”

For Dominion to convince a jury that Fox should be held liable for defamation and pay damages, it has to clear an extremely high legal bar known as the “actual malice” standard. Dominion must show either that people inside Fox knew what hosts and guests were saying about the election technology company was false, or that they effectively ignored information proving that the statements in question were wrong — which is known in legal terms as displaying a reckless disregard for the truth.

A judge recently ruled that Dominion had met that actual malice standard “at this stage,” allowing it to expand the scope of its case against Fox and the kind of evidence it can seek from the company’s senior executives.

In late June, Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court denied a motion from Fox that would have excluded the parent Fox Corporation from the case — a much larger target than Fox News itself. That business encompasses the most profitable parts of the Murdoch American media portfolio and is run directly by Rupert Murdoch, 91, who serves as chairman, and his elder son, Lachlan, the chief executive.

Soon after, Fox replaced its outside legal team on the case and hired one of the country’s most prominent trial lawyers — a sign that executives believe that the chances the case is headed to trial have increased.

Dominion’s lawyers have focused some of their questioning in depositions on the decision-making hierarchy at Fox News, according to one person with direct knowledge of the case, showing a particular interest in what happened on election night inside the network in the hours after it projected Mr. Trump would lose Arizona. That call short-circuited the president’s plan to prematurely declare victory, enraging him and his loyalists and precipitating a temporary ratings crash for Fox.

These questions have had a singular focus, this person said: to place Lachlan Murdoch in the room when the decisions about election coverage were being made. This person added that while testimony so far suggests the younger Murdoch did not try to pressure anyone at Fox News to reverse the call — as Mr. Trump and his campaign aides demanded the network do — he did ask detailed questions about the process that Fox’s election analysts had used after the call became so contentious.

Fox’s legal team has cited the broad protections the First Amendment allows, arguing that statements about Dominion machines from its anchors like Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Bartiromo, and guests like Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, were protected opinion and the kind of speech that any media organization would cover as indisputably newsworthy.

“When the president and his lawyers are making allegations, that in and of itself is newsworthy,” Dan Webb, the trial lawyer brought in by Fox several weeks ago, said in an interview. “To say that shouldn’t be reported on, I don’t think a jury would buy that. And that’s what I think the plaintiffs are saying here.”

Mr. Webb’s most recent experience in a major media defamation case was representing the other side: a South Dakota meat manufacturer in a lawsuit against ABC for a report about the safety of low-cost processed beef trimmings, often called “pink slime.” The case was settled in 2017.

But Fox has also been searching for evidence that could, in effect, prove the Dominion conspiracy theories weren’t really conspiracy theories. Behind the scenes, Fox’s lawyers have pursued documents that would support numerous unfounded claims about Dominion, including its supposed connections to Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan dictator who died in 2013, and software features that were ostensibly designed to make vote manipulation easier.

According to court filings, the words and phrases that Fox has asked Dominion to search for in internal communications going back more than a decade include “Chavez” and “Hugo,” along with “tampered,” “backdoor,” “stolen” and “Trump.”

Fox News and Fox Business gave a platform to some of the loudest purveyors of these theories, including Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder, and Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, in the days and weeks after major news outlets including Fox declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the president-elect. In one interview, Mr. Giuliani falsely claimed that Dominion was owned by a Venezuelan company with close ties to Mr. Chavez, and that it was formed “to fix elections.” (Dominion was founded in Canada in 2002 by a man who wanted to make it easier for blind people to vote.)

Mr. Dobbs, who conducted one of the interviews cited in Dominion’s complaint, responded encouragingly to Mr. Giuliani, saying he believed he was witnessing “the endgame to a four-and-a-half-year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States.” Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s Fox Business show last year, though it has never issued a retraction for any of the commentary about Dominion.

Dominion has also filed separate lawsuits against Mr. Giuliani, Ms. Powell and Mr. Lindell.

Dominion says in its complaint that in the weeks after the election, people started leaving violent voice mail messages at its offices, threatening to execute everyone who worked there and blow up the headquarters. At one office, someone hurled a brick through a window. The company had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on security and lost hundreds of millions more in business, according to its complaint.

“The harm to Dominion from the lies told by Fox is unprecedented and irreparable because of how fervently millions of people believed them — and continue to believe them,” its complaint said.

The company has tried to draw a connection between those falsehoods and the Jan. 6 siege at the Capitol. “These lies did not simply harm Dominion,” the company said in the complaint. “They harmed democracy. They harmed the idea of credible elections.”

As part of its case, it cites one of the most indelible images from the Jan. 6 attack: a man in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, clutching zip ties in his left hand. Also in the suit is a second photo of the man, later identified as Eric Munchel of Tennessee, in which he is brandishing a shotgun, with Mr. Trump on a television in the background. The television is tuned to Fox Business.

But the hurdle Dominion must clear is whether it can persuade a jury to believe that people at Fox knew they were spreading lies.

“Disseminating ‘The Big Lie’ isn’t enough,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor and First Amendment scholar at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. “It has to be a knowing lie.”

 

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Paul Wesley

Paul Wesley 3277

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6 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

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I caught a few minutes of his show tonight... which is about all I could endure without my head exploding.  

His audience was told repeatedly that it has turned out that there were absolutely no classified documents there, and the government's case has been proven 100% false.  It was pure disinformation delivered with seething rage.

I'm not sure how long a democracy can survive this poison being injected on a daily basis by the "news" network with the widest viewership.

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5 hours ago, Al Bundy's Napoleon Hand said:

Capture+_2022-08-14-02-32-30-1.png

And I heard that Garland personally signed off on the order. Meanwhile, Joe Dementia doesn't even know where Ohio is anymore.

11 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

FaFXEknUIAExEFd?format=jpg&name=900x900

We did. That's why he's sitting at Mar-a-Lago instead of the Oval Office.

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SmokeyTheBear

SmokeyTheBear 5562

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It's always Russia,  Russia,  Russia with these folks

/s

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-uses-fbi-trump-raid-foment-discord-amplify-tensions-us

"The Russians understand that Donald Trump is a hot button in America and they use their narratives to foment discord and amplify tensions in our country," Rebekah Koffler, a former DIA intelligence officer and the author of "Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America," told Fox News.

 

The comments come after multiple Russian media outlets have expressed support for Trump in the days since the FBI raid on his home, with both Izvestia and RenTV arguing over the weekend that the raid was designed to prevent Trump from running for president in 2024.

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45473

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1 hour ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

It's always Russia,  Russia,  Russia with these folks

/s

https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-uses-fbi-trump-raid-foment-discord-amplify-tensions-us

"The Russians understand that Donald Trump is a hot button in America and they use their narratives to foment discord and amplify tensions in our country," Rebekah Koffler, a former DIA intelligence officer and the author of "Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America," told Fox News.

 

The comments come after multiple Russian media outlets have expressed support for Trump in the days since the FBI raid on his home, with both Izvestia and RenTV arguing over the weekend that the raid was designed to prevent Trump from running for president in 2024.

Well that's not gonna go over well with the rubes.

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Brisketexan

Brisketexan 104437

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This is what I still can’t connect in my brain: how could any graduate of the university of texas who supports Trump look around him, realize that the people agreeing with him are the worst of aggy and Russian state media, and not immediately realize HOLY FUCK I MUST BE WRONG.
I don’t get it. If I ever take ANY position on an issue of substance, and find myself accompanied by a cheering throng of aggy and Russian news outlets….I’m immediately questioning my position.

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11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

This is what I still can’t connect in my brain: how could any graduate of the university of texas who supports Trump look around him, realize that the people agreeing with him are the worst of aggy and Russian state media, and not immediately realize HOLY FUCK I MUST BE WRONG.
I don’t get it. If I ever take ANY position on an issue of substance, and find myself accompanied by a cheering throng of aggy and Russian news outlets….I’m immediately questioning my position.

Not even just that. Just the weird logic pretzel you have to twist yourself into.

The easy question of "Should any person have top secret documents being held in their pool house?" turns into an answer of "Defund the FBI!"

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89350

Posted
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2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

This is what I still can’t connect in my brain: how could any graduate of the university of texas who supports Trump look around him, realize that the people agreeing with him are the worst of aggy and Russian state media, and not immediately realize HOLY FUCK I MUST BE WRONG.
I don’t get it. If I ever take ANY position on an issue of substance, and find myself accompanied by a cheering throng of aggy and Russian news outlets….I’m immediately questioning my position.

They were very conflicted when we hired an Armenian for our football coach.  

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Red Five

Red Five 40593

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I'd like to see where they go with that argument. "You see, shortly before Biden was inaugurated, Trump declassified a shitpot of nuclear/military/whatever secrets and boxed everything up and took it all home and refused to return it and then lied about returning it. And no you may not ask me why."

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NameAlreadyInUse

NameAlreadyInUse 5104

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The problem is, even conceding Nixon’s argument is true for a second, what we are actually talking about is something Trump did after he was no longer president, so their point is moot anyway. Because it was the act of non-president trump taking shit with him when he left his job that his former employer wanted back that is at issue here, not what then President Trump might have looked at inside the White House while he was president. 
 

i wish they’d at least try to make cogent arguments. 

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F250

F250 28647

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2 hours ago, Satchel said:

The guy reciting the Nixon argument is a graduate of UT Law.

What I have discovered over the last few years is that for those of us with STEM graduate degrees this is what Law School would look like.

test guy GIF

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atomheartbevo

atomheartbevo 89350

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1 hour ago, chainsaw said:

This sounds like the legal equivalent of being tagged and saying "I had invincibility powers the whole time so I can't be tagged"

It’s like accidentally killing a neighborhood bully in late November of 1988 with lawn darts, and nobody can do shit to you because you were still a minor, the CPSC hadn’t technically banned them yet, and you made sure that the darts had no documentation, warnings, etc. still with them, and you aren’t sure where they came from, and the other three kids who were there all stuck to their stories that the bully was forcing everybody to play chicken with the darts.

Well, maybe not quite like that.

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NWBuck

NWBuck 8543

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1 hour ago, chainsaw said:

This sounds like the legal equivalent of being tagged and saying "I had invincibility powers the whole time so I can't be tagged"

"Calvinball as public policy" will be the title of my next Ted Talk. 

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